About 2 billion people ' just under a quarter of the world's population ' lack regular access to clean drinking water. And roughly 800,000 people annually die from illnesses associated with unsanitary water. Drinking water access is a fundamental problem for human and economic development. The U.N., for instance, highlighted the issue in its Sustainable Development Goals of 2015, an ambitious 17-point agenda that specified safe drinking water as a basic global aim. Past research shows that democracies, in comparison to other forms of government, tend to be more successful at delivering this kind of public good, which benefits a large portion of the population. This is likely due to accountability measures that include elections, greater transparency, and more freedom in civil society. But now a study led by an MIT professor shows that across nearly 100 countries with developing economies, that dynamic has become more complex in the 21st century. While democracies are slightly ahead of non-democracies when it comes to providing at least some water, they have been falling behind when it comes to ensuring that there is safe water on tap....
The proposed new annual indicators include economic metrics such as household disposable income per person, and environmental data such as a country's greenhouse gas emissions and levels of particulate matter in the air. Also included are health and education indicators such as life expectancy and children's performance in reading and maths; as well as measures of wellbeing such as the proportion of women and girls subjected to physical and/or sexual violence. Fifteen of the 31 proposed indicators are already part of indicators for the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The new indicators are in a report, Counting What Counts, written by a multidisciplinary committee of researchers and policymakers, co- chaired by economists Kaushik Basu, based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Nora Lustig at Tulane University in New Orleans. The group was assembled last year by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Attempts to dethrone GDP, including by the UN, go back at least three decades but this is the first time that a UN chief has responded to such a request from member states. Speaking at a launch event at UN headquarters in New York City on 7 May, Guterres called the report a 'landmark step in correcting a longstanding blind spot in measuring progress'....
'There is a new type of politics that is undermining the credibility of official statistics,' says Joao Pedro Azevedo, chief statistician for the United Nations children's agency UNICEF in New York City. Official statistics are data collected and validated by both national statistical agencies and international organizations. Nearly every country has an agency for official statistics. They collect information and organize it into statistics about myriad aspects of life, including what people earn, how many individuals are employed, how well children perform in school, the quality of nutrition, how long patients have to wait for an operation, levels of air pollution and increases to average temperatures. National agencies collect data through surveys and from secondary sources. These data sets are used by governments to inform policy, by businesses to plan for the future, and by researchers and advocacy organizations. Official statistics, such as those measuring nations' gross domestic product (GDP), are also the foundation for monitoring progress towards the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the world's plan to end poverty and achieve environmental sustainability....
Most corporate circular economy strategies focus on incremental improvements in products and operations, overlooking transformative innovations emerging from grassroots communities. These local initiatives'driven by necessity and resource constraints'offer scalable solutions for waste reduction, supply chain resilience, and environmental and social leadership. To unlock shared value and future-proof business, leaders should broaden their innovation funnel, map waste streams, invest in community partnerships, and update metrics to reflect both different types of return on investment....
